I didn't mean to imply that it was just in his opening sentences that Orwell used passives, rather that he couldn't resist the passive.  (The same is true for E. B. White, Stephen King, and all other writers who have ruled against the passive.  In any case, thanks for your example, Karl, and I love "the law of prescriptive retaliation."

       Re Linda's suggestion on identifying passives, none of Orwell's passives that I found used a "by"-phrase, and I'm all but certain that in their corpus, Quirk et al found that 80% of all passives did not contain a "by"-phrase.  A stated or implied passive would be a much more useful test for students, except that, in my experience, at least, they don't do well filling out the implieds.

Ed Schuster


**************
It's Tax Time! Get tips, forms, and advice on AOL Money & Finance.
(http://money.aol.com/tax?NCID=aolprf00030000000001) To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/